By Henry Hopwood-Phillips, Asia Times, 3/15/24

Henry Hopwood-Phillips is founder of Daotong Strategy (DS), a Singapore-based political consultancy. He has contributed to several magazines including American Affairs, Spectator and The Critic in the past.

“[There is] the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia.” – Samuel Huntington, “Clash of Civilizations” (1996).

The opening drama of the Ukraine war, involving sweeping drone shots, ant-like convoys and plans so secret that most Russian commanders received orders just 24 hours before the invasion, tended to derail meaningful analysis.

Rather than focus efforts on unpacking Moscow’s motivations and a series of nested conflicts, commentators preferred the more glamorous task of forecasting outcomes and timescales.

In President Vladimir Putin, the West found a scapegoat that united left and right with the latter throwing off the shackles of pacifism and relativism, and the former reveling in the reactionary identity of the opponent. To label Russian security concerns as anything other than sophistry risked being tarred as not only part of a fifth column but a dupe.

In those heady days, there was a tangible catharsis to swerving questions surrounding the casus belli and concentrating on trialing military hardware and tactics. In short, celebrating the destruction – an option not available against less politically acceptable opponents.

Over two years on, less glib narratives might have come to the fore yet Russia’s demonization persists – despite being rooted in precisely the solipsism that channeled fractious interests into a clash of arms in the first place; a conflict that has enabled Moscow to annex four regions, approximately a fifth of Ukraine.

It also leans on several historical accounts that have lost traction with reality. Fantasies include the notion that the Cold War was resolved by Moscow’s total submission rather than a staggered implosion in which only ideologically hostile elements proved capable of disciplining kleptocrats.

And the idea that peace, trade and globalization were the gifts of a liberal cornucopia that would turn viral, an assertion hard to square with the rise of illiberal powers such as China, Russia, Iran and India.

Such complacent narratives also leave the West woefully unprepared for changes in tack from non-liberal leaders. In March 2024, for example, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban revealed presidential candidate Donald Trump’s position on the conflict, saying that “He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war, which is why the war will end.”

In such an environment it is clear that the West knows what it supports: Ukraine is a free country and Western institutions have a right to amass any countries that wish to subscribe. Few in the West, however, are sure as to what the opposition stands for other than a garden variety of Death Star imperialism.

It is rare, for example, to find many who concern themselves with the fact that neutrality was written into Ukraine’s 1990 declaration of sovereignty and 1996 constitution, both repudiated in Kiev’s 2019 volte-face. A handful care to recall that bloc-based thinking has been foundational to Europe’s collective security for most of its history.

Formalized in the postwar period as the “indivisibility” principle, which advised that the “security of one nation” is considered “inseparable from other countries in its region,” it was enshrined in the Helsinki Final Act, the Paris Charter and innumerable other texts, and lately promoted by China as part of its Global Security Initiative (GSI).

At the heart of the conflict lies an essential fact: Russia was excluded from an expanding political West, which was unwilling to compromise its hegemonic ambitions while remaining vulnerable to the gradual erosion of its appendages. Moscow’s attempts to join the West on its own terms were consistently rebuffed, most notably in 2000–01 when Putin floated the idea of Russia joining NATO.

In brief, Moscow confronts a defense pact it is excluded from, while a framework of collective security which includes it is absent, causing a groundswell of fears rooted in NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign of Serbia in 1999 and its involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. To Putin, this suggests that far from entering a new enlightened age, security orders remain hegemonic.

His forebear, president Yeltsin, had warned in 1994 that NATO enlargement would bring about the prospect of a “Cold Peace” characterized by mistrust and fear. NATO activism in Serbia culminating in the Bucharest Summit (2008) declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would become members indicated that NATO aimed at enveloping Moscow.

If Russia’s Blizhnee Zarubezhe (Near Abroad) were to vanish in a mass of Western satellite states it would not take long for the Kremlin to be drowned by a tide of value shifts discrediting its rule. More concretely, there was also the risk that major assets such as the Sevastopol naval base, home to the Black Sea Fleet, might fall into the hands of US proxies.

Moreover, it is not clear that a broad consensus underpins Kiev’s hostile stance towards Russia. As late as 2014, a strong constituency preferred closer links with Moscow and today the total war has fatigued even its strongest supporters.

Yet Ukrainian elites deepened derussianization, suppressing the Russian language in civic life for example, and encouraged the US and UK to transform the Ukrainian armed forces, causing Putin to complain in 2022 that the country had been converted into a hostile “bridgehead.” The prospect of Ukraine repudiating its non-nuclear status, broached by President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference 2022, represented the final straw.

An unfashionable truth is that small nations on the doormat of hegemons are rarely permitted to challenge the latter’s agendas. There is a reason why the last time Ireland was able to stage large-scale offensives against Britain was the Dark Ages; why Cambodia and Laos are essentially client states; why America was able to detach Texas from Mexico with impunity.

In South America, Washington’s Monroe Doctrine simply made explicit what great powers typically kept implicit, and still Cuba attempted to defy it only to be confronted by the prospect of a nuclear holocaust.

Holding the geopolitical high ground, the West can afford to dismiss older mechanisms such as “spheres of influence” and goals like “balancing powers” as relics, the sort of thinking that harvested only global wars.

Russia, however, sees the abandonment of these concepts as attempts to convert victory into ideological imperialism, an escalation not unlike the Ottoman devshirme in which an enemy was not merely defeated but forced to resemble the former opponent.

The truancy of a framework capable of resolving lower-order logics or ideologies is palpable in such circumstances, not just intellectually – which is ironic given Western academia’s obsession with respecting and understanding the other – but also systematically in the sense that the only truly coercive part of the international apparatus, the UN Security Council, is subject to paralyzing vetoes.

Misrepresentations of Russia might boost short-term poll numbers but they rarely help resolve wars. The most popular accusation of imperialism is hardly an engaging explanatory model for Russian actions.

There is no evidence of plans to invade Moldova, Poland or the Baltic republics. Russia is already the world’s largest country and can barely govern its existing territory – facts compounded by distressing memories of trying to steer an ill-tempered Eastern European bloc.

Far more likely is that Ukraine’s wish to rid itself of neocolonial influence entails systemic “derussianization”, which Moscow finds geopolitically unsettling and emotionally insulting, not least due to Kiev’s formative role in Russian history which, according to Putin, renders it “inalienable.”

Many nations are polycentric with homelands that are not particularly close to contemporary capitals. To empathize, imagine the psychological impact of Wessex being pulled into a foreign power’s orbit, a Frankish homeland around Reims deviating from an alignment with the Paris Basin or Weimar Triangle, or Washington’s response to a UK attempt to ally with Russia. Madrid, in fact, has stopped only short of war to keep Barcelona and its hinterland bound to a union.

In hindsight, the West’s triumphalism unmoored Russia from the pretense of being a Western power – an alignment with roots in Peter the Great’s reign – encouraging it to identify with a resurgent East which rejects bloc politics and insists on the sovereign equality of its members.

The East, in essence, adheres to the sovereign internationalism the UN celebrated immediately after WWII. Its support for this flattened mode of relations is a reaction to an uptick in the West’s political will to enforce universal values – mounting interventions if necessary – under the rubric of human rights.

While these ideals appear palatable in the abstract, the West is often charged with appropriating ideals to pursue broader geopolitical ambitions, generating double standards in partial and selective application.

According to this view, the West has delegitimized – or at least created a hierarchy of – other value systems to such an extent that rising powers may wish to risk war rather than subject themselves to the moral hectoring and condemnation that accompanies a failure to adhere to western scripts, meaning the current system risks escalating rather than impeding global conflict.

Russia’s threat perceptions may have been exaggerated yet what matters in diplomacy is how a protagonist sees the world and not how the West would like them to see it. Key Western players knew that Ukrainian entry into NATO – articulated as a goal in the 2019 constitutional amendment – would be the thickest of red lines for Moscow, a direct challenge to its interests, yet it has remained willing to flex down to the very last Ukrainian.

There is a strong case that democracy is worth defending with arms no matter how flawed its decisions but such arguments from morality fall flat when they risk inducing world wars or nuclear threats. While international norms have undoubtedly been compromised, they have arguably been transgressed no more or less than US decisions to invade Vietnam or Iraq.

In the past, such statements would have been considered anodyne yet today – in the heyday of liberalism’s ideological monopoly – they are flagged as haw-hawism. In hindsight, the Cold War drummed an epistemic humility into the West that has long since evaporated.

Political premises become legal norms, which are eventually treated as natural law, forcing nations that have failed to develop in the same manner to infer their subordinate status.

The result has been not just a monoculture at home and hubris abroad, but also a naivety best encapsulated by the hope that war can be banned, or that the three ancient civilizations of Eurasia – China, Russia and Iran – are bound to vanish in a boundless liberal order. Such is the zealotry that when events deviate from theories the former are denigrated rather than the latter revised.

Behind mawkish ideals lurks the vanity that the globe shares a Western trajectory; that rationality as conceived by Westerners is identically conceived and deployed by others; that it is a unifying principle. Yet rationality underpins several political systems – authoritarian, Communist, hybrid and so on – all of which are capable of exerting or enforcing severely different versions of reality.

The West currently falls between two stools, failing to either commence construction of a world state – with the political compromises such a project would entail – or retire into a parochial liberalism that acknowledges its ideals as historically and geographically contingent.

Instead, it stands in a no-man’s-land in which global institutions, insofar as they exist, disclaim Western hegemony even while utilizing it, making the use of military firepower highly attractive to rising powers who do not have the same soft power resources to exploit.

At the heart of the Ukrainian conflict is a tension over how politics is conceived. The Russians subscribe to an ancient order in which the res publica is born through a people’s readiness to kill or die on its behalf. The act of taking lives or giving them – hence the importance of sacrifice in most early-stage states – identifies a community: the people and its myths are to an extent the chicken and egg of sovereignty.

At root, it openly relies on violence as a coercive tool. The West switched from this order towards a more peaceful one – which depends on far less violent forms of coercion – in the postwar period, eccentrically arguing that conventional conceptions of power were obsolete after devastation in two world wars and being partitioned in the subsequent conflict.

It did so by exchanging the explicit strictures of the Christian faith for its soft patterning in the likes of Kant’s “Weltburgerbund” and Habermas’ call for a cosmopolitan order which established a regime of “global governance without a world government” – switches in register that made Western norms easier to export without inviting charges of imperialism.

Rather than indulge in judgment on which framework is more true or morally laudable, it is worth highlighting that the West loses the moral high ground if it proves more willing to risk nuclear war than establish a framework that acknowledges the validity of concerns that stem from different political systems.

While it remains open to dispute whether the post-Christian cultures of Western democracies are suitable as paradigms for the rest of the world, a realistic picture of conflict resolution must conceive of a diversity of socio-political orders in terms of a meta-ethical or meta-political plurality if resolutions are to be rediscovered at the point of a pen rather than the barrel a gun.

YouTube link here.

By Thomas d’Istria (Kyiv, correspondent), Le Monde, 3/14/24

The photos, which were taken in the first weeks of the Russian invasion, have hung ever since then – side by side – on the premises of the Starlight Media television group. They depict journalists working from darkly-lit makeshift shelters, at a time when Russian forces were only 20 kilometers from the center of the capital, Kyiv.

On Friday, March 8, the media conglomerate’s communications manager pointed to the portrait of a man sitting at a school desk. She explained that it was Orest Drymalovsky, a star presenter of Starlight’s ICTV channel, who had announced his mobilization to the Ukrainian army in early February, live on air. “A powerful signal for our audience,” said Yana Honcharenko with a hint of pride.

This announcement was all the more powerful as it was made in the context of the United News Telemarathon, a major tool in the information war waged by the Ukrainian authorities. For more than two years now, teams from six channels have been jointly producing and simultaneously broadcasting identical news content – 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The initiative was initially conceived by journalists as a way of maintaining the country’s cohesion against Russian attempts at destabilization via social media, before being passed into law by presidential decree in March 2022.

“While, at the start of the invasion, the production of the ‘marathon’ was a unifying factor and was watched by half the country, the situation has now changed,” said Svitlana Ostapa, head of the supervisory board of the Suspilne public television and radio broadcasting group.

Representatives of channels linked to opposition groups (Espresso.tv, 5 Kanal and Priamyi), which were sidelined at the outset of the “telemarathon” before being excluded from the national system of digital video broadcasting (DVB-T2) in April 2022 − thereby losing 40% of their audience − have accused the authorities of taking control of the country’s media. Several human rights organizations, and Ukrainian civil society more broadly, have recently called for the return of plurality in the country’s news channels.

Trust has been continually eroding

Above all, confidence in these programs, as measured by opinion polls, has been plummeting among the Ukrainian population. “The term ‘telemarathon’ has become synonymous with excessive positive propaganda reporting on victories, while the situation on the front lines is worsening,” said Otar Dovzhenko, an official from the NGO Lviv Media Forum.

“In reality, that’s not exactly true,” he immediately qualified, “because the telemarathon doesn’t systematically broadcast such positive propaganda. Rather, it’s seen as a communication tool for the authorities, one that society, it’s true, doesn’t entirely trust.” Of the six broadcasters participating in the telemarathon, the expert considered the teams at Suspilne, 1+1 Media Group and Starlight to be “professional and responsible.” On the other hand, he noted that the “Rada TV” parliamentary channel – which has stopped broadcasting plenary sessions of the Ukrainian Parliament since the start of the invasion – and the My-Ukraina (“We are Ukraine”) channel “focus excessively on government representatives and on building up their positive image.”

After reaching up to 40% of viewership ratings following the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022, this “telemarathon” has now fallen to 10% of viewership, according to Ostapa. Viewers’ levels of trust have been continually eroding: from 69% in May 2022, to 36% in February 2024, according to the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology (KIIS). Also per this institute’s latest study, the share of Ukrainians who do not trust the program is now at 47%, compared with 38% in December 2023.

This decline of interest in Ukrainian television has prompted participating newsrooms to explore ways to re-engage their viewership. “The best producers are thinking every day about finding solutions that would be in the interest of Ukrainians,” said Oleksandr Bohutskyi, CEO of Starlight Media, the owner of the ICTV channel.

The issue of this program’s future has also been a matter of concern for Mykyta Poturaiev, who – before becoming a Ukrainian MP in 2019 with the presidential party Servant of the People – had spent his entire career in positions of responsibility in the media industry. “We want all citizens to be able to receive verified information,” said the head of the country’s humanitarian and information policy parliamentary committee. However today, “there are only two possibilities,” he said: “Either the telemarathon invents a new format, or we stop it.” To justify his position, Poturaiev also pointed to the cost of the programs (465.2 million Ukrainian hryven in 2024, or around €11 million), which he felt was too high given the low viewership figures.

Using Telegram for ‘alternative’ information

Galina Petrenko, director of media watchdog Detector Media, has also observed the decline in interest in the “telemarathon,” but called attention to the existence of a core group of loyal followers. This expert was amused at this discrepancy between the positions of civil society organizations, which have been critical of the program “because we are for freedom of expression,” and those really held by viewers: “We see that a portion of society still needs this format.”

Over two years of war, Ukrainian people have considerably changed the ways by which they obtain information. This has been reflected in a massive increase in the use of Telegram channels, to receive “alternative” information – as opposed to that put out by the “telemarathon.” This has also been because channels on this encrypted messaging app are more effective for use in wartime: “When you’re in a bomb shelter and you need information related to your safety, you’re not going to turn on the TV and wait for them to bring up something that is relevant to you,” said Petrenko.

As a result, she said, “[Volodymyr Zelensky’s] communications team has begun to understand that the government can’t rely on the telemarathon alone, and is trying to exert influence through other news channels.” While the presidential administration has allowed independent media to operate freely on the internet, “it has started to take control of [some] Telegram channels because it sees that they are now the main sources of information.” At a press conference held by the president in December 2023, three Telegram channel representatives were invited, two of whom were officially accredited.

In Petrenko’s opinion, the most problematic aspect of this “telemarathon” is its unequal political representation. According to Detector Media’s research into the profiles of guests on the program, former President Petro Poroshenko’s opposition party European Solidarity was clearly under-represented when compared with Zelensky’s Servant of the People party.

Ostapa, head of the supervisory board at Suspilne, qualified the authorities’ responsibility for the choice of guests. For commercial channels which are part of the “telemarathon” – such as 1+1, Inter and ICTV – “it’s more a form of self-censorship,” she said, “because journalists don’t want to broadcast information that Zelensky might not like, or invite guests he might not want to see.”

By Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine, 3/5/24

Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023).

On January 31, New York City councilman Robert Holden wrote a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg calling for reopening of the investigation into the death of Dorothy Kilgallen.

Described by Ernest Hemingway as “one of the greatest women writers in the world,” Kilgallen was a regular on the CBS game show What’s My Line who wrote a column for the New York Journal-American during the early 1960s that was syndicated to 200 newspapers.^[1]

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Kilgallen was one of the few journalists to question the findings of the Warren Commission report that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

Kilgallen interviewed Jack Ruby at his trial and exposed his Warren Commission testimony before its release date, causing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to become a mortal enemy.^[2]

If she had lived past the age of 52, Kilgallen’s goal was to expose evidence pointing to the truth about the JFK assassination and corruption at the Warren Commission passed on to her by Commission member Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky in a “tell-all” book she was writing for Random House.

Kilgallen’s body was found in her Manhattan townhouse on the morning of November 8, 1965, sitting upright in a bed in the master bedroom.

Kilgallen’s death was officially determined to have been caused by a combination of alcohol and barbiturates, with the police stating that there was no indication of violence or suicide. New York City Medical Examiner James Luke said that the circumstances of her death were undetermined, though “the overdose could well have been accidental.”

However, numerous people close to Kilgallen recognized at the time that the overdose was not accidental. The chief counsel of 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), G. Robert Blakey, said that though the HSCA’s look into Kilgallen’s death was not substantial, “we thought it was fishy.”^[3]

Kilgallen’s hairdresser Marc Sinclaire, the first to report Kilgallen’s death at 9:30 a.m. on November 8 after passing by her home, was suspicious because a) Kilgallen was found in a room where she did not normally sleep wearing fancy clothes she would not have gone to sleep in; b) was found sitting up with a book turned upside down (The Honey Badger by Robert Ruark) she had finished weeks before; c) had poor eyesight and required glasses to read but no glasses were found in the room where she died; and d) because a police car was parked outside the townhouse when Sinclaire got there, though Kilgallen’s death had not yet been reported.

Sinclaire ruled out suicide further because Dorothy was a) religiously Catholic; b) cheerful about life; c) at the peak of her fame, earning an income of $200,000 per year (equivalent to $1.5 million today); and d) intent on completing her tell-all book on the JFK assassination.

Sinclaire also knew that Kilgallen would not overdose because she did not have a drug problem or drink heavily. In the days before her death, additionally, she had confided in him her belief that someone close to her was a “snitch” who was watching her closely and feeding information to people who wished to do her harm.^[4]

Johnnie Ray, Kilgallen’s lover whom Tony Bennett called “the father of rock ’n’ roll,” told a friend that he did not believe Dorothy had died of natural causes. Dorothy had told him that she had been investigating the JFK assassination and was “close to breaking the whole case open” and had “been threatened as a result of her work.”^[5]

Other people who expressed suspicion about Kilgallen’s death included:

1. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, who said: “They killed Dorothy; now they’ll go after Ruby.”
2. Gossip columnist Liz Smith, who wrote in her column: “Dorothy knew too much. Her murder was very mysterious.”
3. Bob Schulenberg, a good friend of Dorothy’s daughter Jill, who told him: “My mother was murdered [because of her work on the JFK assassination].”
4. Eileen Broich, the wife of toxicologist John Broich, who said that her husband told her that “Dorothy was bumped off.”^[6]
5. Dr. Charles Umberger, Director of Toxicology in the Department of Pathology at the New York City Medical Examiner’s office.
6. Watergate Burglar and undercover CIA operative Frank Sturgis, who told Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro’s lover and a fellow CIA agent, that “Kilgallen got whacked” because of her intention to publish a book which included information from her exclusive interviews with Jack Ruby.^[7]

Mark Shaw is a former criminal defense attorney and TV legal analyst who researched the Kilgallen case for a long period and appears to have solved it.

Shaw first learned about the Kilgallen case while practicing law with Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s attorney in the 1980s, and developed great admiration for Kilgallen.

In three books—The Reporter Who Knew Too Much (2016); Collateral Damage (2021); and Fighting For Justice (2022)—he lays out the evidence about Kilgallen’s murder and shows who was behind it.

One of the oddities that Shaw found was that Kilgallen’s death certificate—which pointed to her death being accidental—was signed by Dr. Dominick DiMaio, the deputy chief of the Office of the Medical Examiner (ME) in Brooklyn, even though Kilgallen was found dead in Manhattan.

Shaw was told by one of his sources, Stephen Goldner, a forensic toxicologist at the Manhattan ME’s office, that it was “known or rumored that DiMaio was known to take care of things for the mafia.”^[8]

Goldner had told Eileen Broich, the wife of his colleague John Broich, that he was writing a book about how the Mafia “controlled the New York City ME’s office in the mid 1960s.” He also told Broich’s son Chris that his dad had been “one of the heroes because he wouldn’t alter toxicology reports like others did in the MEs office.”^[9]

Kilgallen was found with two barbiturates in her bloodstream that she had never before consumed—Nembutal and Tuinal—which indicated foul play.

There were two glasses present at her bedside table, which meant that someone was in the bedroom with her when she died. Kilgallen’s butler James Clement, told Kilgallen’s daughter that he remembered that Dorothy was accompanied by a man when she arrived home during the early morning hours before she died.

Evidence that her drink had been spiked was reflected in the fact that powdered traces of the barbiturates were found on one of the glasses at her bedside. If by some chance she had committed suicide, Kilgallen would have taken it in capsule form, which would have left no residue. Shaw writes that the “powdered barbiturates undercut the accidental death conclusion of ME Dr. Luke.”^[10]

The accidental death conclusion is further undercut by the fact that Kilgallen was found wearing false eyelashes, a hairpiece and makeup that she never wore to bed, which indicated that she was dressed up after she had been killed.

The air conditioner was turned on in her apartment even though it was fifty-five degrees outside, which offered a clue that Kilgallen was murdered because, according to Dr. Charles A. Mathis, a fellow at the prestigious American College of Cardiology,, “in a cold environment, alcohol and barbiturates are all respiratory suppressants.”^[11]

The million-dollar question that Shaw had to try to answer was who Kilgallen’s guest was who was drinking from the second glass that was found at her bedside.

His answer is a fellow journalist named Ronald Pataky, a film and drama critic for The Columbus Citizen-Journal, who had met Kilgallen in June 1964 on the set of The Sound of Music in Austria during a press junket. Friends called Pataky, to whom Dorothy gave an apartment and Thunderbird automobile, Dorothy’s “boy toy.” [Pataky was 23 years younger than Kilgallen]^[12]

A good-looking man who had an affair with Frank Sinatra’s wife Mia Farrow, Pataky had a violent past: He was arrested after getting drunk and throwing a glass across the room at Cinderfella (1960) actress Anna Maria Alberghetti who was then his fiancee, and for firing four shots with a .38 caliber pistol at former NFL player Jim Otis and threatening him with a blackjack.

After he dropped out of Stanford University in the mid 1950s, Pataky allegedly enrolled in the School of the Americas in Panama, the infamous CIA training ground for Latin American security forces.

In late 2019, Shaw was told by a credible confidential source, the Las Vegas Sands Hotel and Casino pit boss during the 1960s who had experience working for the FBI and CIA, that Pataky had landed in some kind of trouble prior to Kilgallen’s death. He was saved by agreeing to become a mole and do dirty work for CIA and FBI agents and underworld figures who were closely monitoring Kilgallen’s JFK investigation and intentions to publish a Random House book.^[13]

Pataky’s key task was to provide his handlers with the secret information that Kilgallen had uncovered in the course of her investigation—information that was lethal in nature.

According to Shaw, Kilgallen and Pataky, on the night of her death, had drinks at the Regency Hotel bar in a back booth where Pataky likely slipped the barbiturates into Dorothy’s drink.

Afterwards, Pataky drove Dorothy back to her townhouse and gave her a glass of water and transferred the remnants of the Nembutal (barbiturate) onto the rim of the glass.

Pataky then assisted Dorothy in getting to her bedroom, and as she passed out, began to search for her JFK assassination research file, including in her closet where Dorothy’s clothes were found strewn about the next morning.

As Pataky searched Dorothy’s house, Shaw believes that he found her dead on the bathroom floor after she had ingested some Pepto Bismol because of her stomach pain. In the minutes before, Dorothy likely experienced bradycardia, a condition marked by a slow heart rate accompanied by dizziness and fainting.

When the body was discovered in the bathroom, Pataky and, possibly, the butler Clement, and Dorothy’s estranged husband, Richard Kollmar, who stayed on a lower floor and discovered Kilgallen’s body, undressed her, replacing her soiled dress with the clothes she was wearing when she was discovered by Marc Sinclaire.^[14]

According to Shaw, Pataky panicked when he could not find her JFK assassination file and phoned his contacts. They called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who sent his operatives to Kilgallen’s townhouse in search of the file. These were the FBI agents (or rogue agents posing as FBI agents) that James Clement saw taking boxes of Kilgallen’s documents and papers away despite his protest.

Taking cues from Hoover, the police only came into Dorothy’s townhouse at 3:00 p.m., hours after Marc Sinclaire had discovered Dorothy’s body and reported her death.

The police investigation afterwards was completely shoddy, with police never searching for fingerprints or combing Dorothy’s townhouse for clues. Additionally, they failed to interview key witnesses, including Marc Sinclaire and Pataky and patrons at the Regency Hotel.^[15]

Pataky basically confessed to his own guilt in two poems that he posted on his website in 2016. The poems were uncovered by Shaw and then taken down from the website soon after Shaw viewed them.

The first poem titled “Never Trust a Stiff at a Typewriter,” read:

There’s a way to quench a gossip’s stench
That never fails
One cannot write if zippered tight
Somebody who’s dead could tell no tales.”^[16]

Kilgallen was a gossip columnist so obviously Pataky was talking about her.

A second poem by Pataky read:

“While I’m spilling my guts
She’s driving me nuts
Please fetch us two drinks
On the run

Just skip all the nois’n
Make one of ’em poison
And don’t even tell me
Which one!^[17]

This poem is equally incriminating because it references the putting of poison into one of the drinks—the method by which Kilgallen was murdered that only the killer would know.^[18]

According to Shaw, Pataky’s cousin, Belva Elliot, said years after Kilgallen’s death that “there’s no reason to dig up the past. Don’t want to hurt Ronnie, but he admitted the poems he wrote about the poisoning, about the zippered tight, were about Dorothy.”^[19]

Elliot added that “Ronnie told me Kilgallen was poisoned because she was too close to the truth about the JFK assassination. Ron wouldn’t say by whom and yes Kilgallen bought an apartment for Ron and a Thunderbird and Ron said he talked to Dorothy just before she died.”^[20]

Shaw makes a case that Kilgallen should be remembered as one of the great journalists of the 20^th century.

Her father, Jim, had been a star reporter for the Hearst organization who said that Dorothy “had an unerring instinct for news…a brilliant style of writing. She was accurate and had a flair for the apt phrase. She had an uncanny ability to produce scoops and an inordinate speed in turning out copy.”^[21]

Paul Schoenstein, an editor at the New York Journal-American where Dorothy had started her career in 1931 and wrote, said that “Dorothy was far and away the greatest reporter there was.”^[22]

At the time of her death, Kilgallen was in the process of writing a true-crime book, Murder One (1967), which included the case of an Ohio doctor whose conviction Kilgallen’s reporting had helped to overturn.

Though leaning to the right politically, Kilgallen had been one of the first reporters to allege that the CIA and organized crime were teaming up to eliminate Fidel Castro.^[23] She had also raised suspicions of foul play in the death of Marilyn Monroe.^[24]

Kilgallen became invested in the Kennedy assassination case in part because of a friendship that she had struck with him; he once met with her and her son in the White House.

In one column, Kilgallen pointed out that, after JFK was shot, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, who was in the first limo of the presidential motorcade, issued orders to “get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened there [atop the grassy knoll].” The next day, Curry lied when he told reporters he thought the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository.^[25]

Kilgallen’s column on November 14, 1965, “Why Did Oswald Risk All by Shooting Cop,” questioned whether Oswald was the one who shot police officer J.D. Tippit after killing Kennedy, as was alleged.

Kilgallen wrote that “a man who knows he is wanted by the authorities after a spectacular crime does not seek out a policeman usually unless he decided to give himself up, and certainly Oswald was not doing that.”^[26]

Kilgallen had been tipped off by a witness, Acquila Clemons, who, contrary to the Warren Report, said that she saw two men involved in the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, not one, and that neither of the men resembled Oswald.^[27]

Kilgallen also reported that Tippit had met with Jack Ruby in Ruby’s Carousel club eight days before the assassination, indicating he may have been part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK.^[28]

Later investigators determined that Oswald could not have been in the location that Tippit was shot at the time Tippit was killed.^[29]

Because of the wide reach of her columns, Kilgallen served as a conduit for information supplied to her on the JFK assassination by Mark Lane, a lawyer who wrote the 1966 best-selling book Rush to Judgment, the first book to critique the Warren Commission.^[30]

Lane said that Kilgallen was “a very, very serious journalist. You might say that she was the only serious journalist in America who was concerned with who killed John Kennedy and getting all of the facts about the assassination.”^[31]

Dorothy had told Lane that their investigations into the Kennedy assassination were dangerous and that the “intelligence agencies will be watching us. We’ll have to be very careful.”^[32]

Kilgallen was indeed subjected to FBI surveillance, with the FBI tapping her home phone line. The CIA also had 53 field offices around the world watching her on her foreign travels.^[33]

At one point, two FBI agents visited Kilgallen to find out how she got Ruby’s testimony before the Warren Commission. She made the agents tea but told them that she could never reveal how she got that exhibit or who gave it to her.^[34] 

J. Edgar Hoover, in one of the reports that he received, scribbled “Wrong” next to a copy of Kilgallen’s November 29, 1963, column, “Oswald File Must Not Close.”

The column questioned how “Ruby—the owner of a strip-tease honky tonk—could have strolled in and out of police headquarters in Dallas as if it were a health club at a time when a small army of law enforcers were keeping a ‘tight security guard’ on Oswald.”

Kilgallen further wrote that “so many people were saying there was something queer about the killing of Oswald, something strange about the way his case was handled, a great deal missing in the official account of his crime. The American people have just lost a beloved president. It was a dark chapter in our history, but we have the right to read every word of it [the Oswald file]. It cannot be kept locked in a file in Dallas.”^[35]

In another column, Kilgallen called the Warren Commission report “laughable” and wrote of Jack Ruby’s statement to her that “the world will never know the true facts of what occurred. My motives, the people who had, that had so much to gain and had such a material motive to put me in the position I’m in would never let the true facts come above board to the world.”^[36]

Kilgallen interviewed Ruby twice, including a private 30 minute interview in the chambers of Judge Joe Brown absent his bodyguards, and came to believe that Ruby was a patsy who had been used and then discarded by the coordinators of the Kennedy assassination.^[37]

She never published any information she obtained from her private talks with Ruby because she was “saving it for the book,” according to Pataky. But Kilgallen did suggest in one of her columns that there were witnesses who saw Oswald inside Ruby’s Carousel Club.

Prior to her death, Kilgallen had been planning to travel a second time to New Orleans for a “cloak-and-daggerish” type trip in which she aimed to further trace Ruby’s past, his mob ties and Oswald’s background, which were also all going to be discussed in her book.^[39]

All the material she compiled on the case was placed in her assassination file—which more than one person saw since, at times, she would carry it around with her.^[40]

Kilgallen’s views on the JFK assassination were summarized when she said that “the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It’s a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances.”^[41]

On September 3, 1965, three months before her death, Kilgallen published her last column on the JFK assassination in which she wrote “Those close to the scene realize that if the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald (now married to another chap) ever gave out the ‘whole story’ of her life with President Kennedy’s alleged assassin, it would split open the front pages of newspapers all over the world.” Kilgallen further wrote that “this story is not going to die as long as there’s a real reporter alive—and there are a lot of them.”^[42]

Unfortunately, for history’s sake, there really was only one real reporter and, when she died, so too did the story. The blackout was evident just before Kilgallen’s death in June 1965 when she planned to speak about the Warren Report on ABC’s Nightlife, having brought parts of her JFK assassination research file, but was told by the show’s producer that the network did not want her to address the subject because it was “too controversial.”^[43]

Hugh Aynesworth, the only reporter present in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was fatally shot, in the Texas Theater when police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, and in the Dallas Police Department when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, wrote to Life Magazine editor Holland McComb in November 1966 that the press had failed to cover the JFK assassination story, stating “few people did much. Fewer newspapers or TV stations took the time to cover the situation adequately.”^[44]

In 1967, the CIA issued a memo to its media assets imploring them to label as “conspiracy theorists” and far-left extremists any investigator who dared challenge the veracity of the Warren report. When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began probing deeply into the case and prosecuted CIA agent Clay Shaw, he was accused not only of being a conspiracy theorist but also of bribing witnesses and to be suffering from psychoneurosis.^[45]

In hindsight, it seems clear that Kilgallen’s murder was intended not only to ensure the theft of her file on the assassination but also to intimidate and silence other reporters who might have been intent on probing into the case.

The historical implications were huge, contributing no less to the destruction of the free press in the U.S. which no longer exists.

1. The column was called “The Voice of Broadway.” ↑
2. Kilgallen had received an advance copy of the Warren Commission Report whose gaps, contradictions and lies she helped to expose. ↑
3. Mark Shaw, Fighting For Justice: The Improbable Journey For Exposing Coverups About the JFK Assassination and Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen (Post Hill Press, 2022), 65. The HSCA primarily investigated the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. ↑
4. Mark Shaw, Collateral Damage: The Mysterious Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen, and the Ties That Bind Them to Robert Kennedy and the JFK Assassination (Franklin, TN: Post Hill Press, 2021), 286; Sara Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen,” Midwest Today, 2007, https://www.midtod.com/dorothys.pdf. ↑
5. Mark Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen (Franklin, TN: Post Hill Press, 2016), 207. ↑
6. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 511. ↑
7. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 460. Sturgis bragged that “we can kill anybody we want. Just blame it on national security.” ↑
8. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 284. ↑
9. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 281. John Broich had to leave the ME’s office. He said that the Mafia was intimidating him and that he was terrified. According to Goldner, Broich was strong-willed and would not be bought or pressured to fudge results like others. Also according to Goldner, two-thirds of the staff at the ME’s office were Sicilian and some were listed with phony credentials and were not actually chemists. ↑
10. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 279; Shaw, Collateral Damage, 516. ↑
11. Shaw, Fighting For Justice, 132. ↑
12. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 460; Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 19. Recipient of a journalism degree from Ohio State in the 1950s, Pataky years later earned a master’s degree in Christian Counseling from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Christian Counseling from Trinity Theological Seminary in Newburgh, Indiana. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 23. ↑
13. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 460. Shaw emphasizes that the authenticity of his source was confirmed by Gianni Russo on his podcast “The Hollywood Godfather” in March 2020. According to the source who knew Frank Sinatra, Pataky was sent by Mafia associates to Las Vegas to check on a blackjack dealer who was supposedly cheating. Pataky allegedly confirmed the dishonesty of the dealer, whom the Mafia killed. ↑
14. The fact that the air conditioner was on was very odd since it was cold outside. ↑
15. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 271, 274. Oddly, a movie magazine editor named Mary Branum received a phone call the morning after Kilgallen was killed. The voice said “Dorothy Kilgallen has been murdered” before hanging up. ↑
16. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 257. ↑
17. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 258. ↑
18. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 467. Pataky died on May 16, 2022. ↑
19. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 467. ↑
20. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 467. ↑
21. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 127. Jim covered the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Alger Hiss case, and surrender of Nazi Germany in World War II among other important stories in his journalism career. ↑
22. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 28. ↑
23. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 34. ↑
24. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” ↑
25. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 19. Kilgallen also reported on the intimidation of witnesses in the case by the Dallas police and FBI. ↑
26. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 78. ↑
27. Lee Israel, Kilgallen: A Biography of Dorothy Kilgallen (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979), 395. ↑
28. Israel, Kilgallen, 373. Some researchers believe that Tippit was one of the assassins of JFK. Kilgallen’s reporting on Tippit’s ties to Ruby came from the reporting by Thayer Waldo of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, which Waldo supplied to Mark Lane though was too afraid to himself publish, telling Lane that “if he published what he knew “there would be real danger to him.” ↑
29. See Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (Berkeley, CA: Hightower Press, 2013). ↑
30. Israel, Kilgallen, 373. ↑
31. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 78; Shaw, Fighting For Justice, 94. ↑
32. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 82. ↑
33. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 23. ↑
34. Israel, Kilgallen, 395. ↑
35. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 175. ↑
36. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 88. ↑
37. Penn Jones Jr. Forgive My Grief II: A Further Critical Review of the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Midlothian Texas: The Midlothian Mirror Inc., 1967), 12, 13. ↑
38. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 66, 67. ↑
39. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 188; Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 20. Melvin Belli called Kilgallen’s scoop on Ruby the “ruin of the Warren Commission.” Kilgallen’s trip to New Orleans was a year before New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began his famed investigation into the JFK assassination and charged Clay Shaw as a conspirator. ↑
40. Israel, Kilgallen, 401. ↑
41. Israel, Kilgallen, 396. ↑
42. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 91. ↑
43. Israel, Kilgallen, 401. ↑
44. Hugh Aynesworth to Holland McCombs, Dallas, Texas, November 29, 1966. From the file of Robert Morrow. For other suspicious deaths of journalists investigating the JFK assassination, see Jones Jr. Forgive My Grief II, 13.. Jones Jr. discusses the case of Jim Koethe, a journalist working for the Dallas Times Herald writing a book on the Kennedy assassination who was killed after a man broke into his home in late November 1964 and karate chopped his throat. Jones Jr. also discusses the mysterious death of Kilgallen’s close friend Ms. Earl E.T Smith (Florence Pritchett), wife of the former U.S. ambassador to Cuba at age 45 two days after Kilgallen’s death, stating that the cause of death was listed in the autopsy as unknown. Jones Jr. suggests that it was possible that Smith was given Kilgallen’s notes for her book on the JFK assassination. ↑
45. See, for example, Hugh Aynesworth, “’Big Jim’s Three-Ring Shaw Trial a One-Man Show,” The Pittsburgh Press, February 2, 1969. Kilgallen’s colleague Bob Considine was characteristic in branding critics of the Warren report as “opportunists,” “crackpots,” and “graverobbers” in his introduction to a 1967 book written by Ricardo Warren Lewis, The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report: The Endless Paradox (New York: Dell, 1967). Israel, Kilgallen, 401. ↑

By Jamie Dettmer, Politico, 4/3/24

KYIV — Wayward entrepreneur Elon Musk’s latest pronouncements regarding the war in Ukraine set teeth on edge, as he warned that even though Moscow has “no chance” of conquering all of Ukraine, “the longer the war goes on, the more territory Russia will gain until they hit the Dnipro, which is tough to overcome.”

“However, if the war lasts long enough, Odesa will fall too,” he cautioned.

With a history of urging Ukraine to agree to territorial concessions — and his opposition to the $60 billion U.S. military aid package snarled on Capitol Hill amid partisan wrangling — Musk isn’t Ukraine’s favorite commentator, to say the least. And his remarks received predictable pushback.

But the billionaire entrepreneur’s forecast isn’t actually all that different from the dire warnings Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made in the last few days. According to Zelenskyy, unless the stalled multibillion-dollar package is approved soon, his forces will have to “go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.” He also warned that some major cities could be at risk of falling.

Obviously, Zelenskyy’s warnings are part of a broad diplomatic effort to free up the military aid his forces so desperately need and have been short of for months — everything from 155-millimeter artillery shells to Patriot air-defense systems and drones. But the sad truth is that even if the package is approved by the U.S. Congress, a massive resupply may not be enough to prevent a major battlefield upset.

And such a setback, especially in the middle of election campaigns in America and Europe, could very well revive Western pressure for negotiations that would obviously favor Russia, leaving the Kremlin free to revive the conflict at a future time of its choosing.

Essentially, everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that’s expected to launch this summer. In a pre-offensive pummeling — stretching from Kharkiv and Sumy in the north to Odesa in the south — Russia’s missile and drone strikes have widely surged in recent weeks, targeting infrastructure and making it hard to guess where it will mount its major push.

And according to high-ranking Ukrainian military officers who served under General Valery Zaluzhny — the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces until he was replaced in February — the military picture is grim.

The officers said there’s a great risk of the front lines collapsing wherever Russian generals decide to focus their offensive. Moreover, thanks to a much greater weight in numbers and the guided aerial bombs that have been smashing Ukrainian positions for weeks now, Russia will likely be able to “penetrate the front line and to crash it in some parts,” they said.

They spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources told POLITICO.

According to him, it is only Ukrainian grit and resilience as well as errors by Russian commanders that may now alter the grim dynamics. Mistakes like the one made on Saturday, when Russia launched one of the largest tank assaults on Ukrainian positions since its full-scale invasion began, only to have the column smashed by Ukraine’s 25th Brigade, which took out a dozen tanks and 8 infantry fighting vehicles — a third of the column’s strength.

Everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that’s expected to launch this summer | Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images

However, the high-ranking Ukrainian officers reminded that relying on Russian errors is not a strategy, and they were bitter about the missteps they say hamstrung Ukraine’s resistance from the start — missteps made by both the West and Ukraine. They were also scathing about Western foot-dragging, saying supplies and weapons systems came too late and in insufficient numbers to make the difference they otherwise could have.

“Zaluzhny used to call it ‘the War of One Chance,’” one of the officers said. “By that, he meant weapons systems become redundant very quickly because they’re quickly countered by the Russians. For example, we used Storm Shadow and SCALP cruise missiles [supplied by Britain and France] successfully — but just for a short time. The Russians are always studying. They don’t give us a second chance. And they’re successful in this.”

“Don’t believe the hype about them just throwing troops into the meat grinder to be slaughtered,” he added. “They do that too, of course — maximizing even more the impact of their superior numbers — but they also learn and refine.”

The officers said the shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles supplied by the U.K. and U.S. in the first weeks of the invasion came in time, helping them save Kyiv — and so, too, did the HIMARS, the light multiple-launch rocket systems, which were used to great effect, enabling them to push Russia out of Kherson in November 2022.

“But often, we just don’t get the weapons systems at the time we need them — they come when they’re no longer relevant,” another senior officer said, citing the F-16 fighter jets as an example. A dozen or so F-16s are expected to be operational this summer, after basic pilot training has been completed. “Every weapon has its own right time. F-16s were needed in 2023; they won’t be right for 2024,” he said.

And that’s because, according to this officer, Russia is ready to counter them: “In the last few months, we started to notice missiles being fired by the Russians from Dzhankoy in northern Crimea, but without the explosive warheads. We couldn’t understand what they were doing, and then we figured it out: They’re range-finding,” he said. The officer explained that Russia’s been calculating where best to deploy its S-400 missile and radar systems in order to maximize the area they can cover to target the F-16s, keeping them away from the front lines and Russia’s logistical hubs.

The officers also said they now need more basic traditional weapons as well as drones. “We need Howitzers and shells, hundreds of thousands of shells, and rockets,” one of them told POLITICO, estimating that Ukraine needed 4 million shells and 2 million drones. “We told the Western partners all the time that we have the combat experience, we have the battlefield understanding of this war. [They] have the resources, and they need to give us what we need,” he added.

Europe, for its part, is trying to help Ukraine make up for its colossal disadvantage in artillery shells. And in this regard, a proposed Czech-led bulk artillery ammunition purchase could bring Ukraine’s total from both within and outside the EU to around 1.5 million rounds at a cost of $3.3 billion — but that’s still short of what it needs.

The officers emphasized that they need many, many more men too. The country currently doesn’t have enough men on the front lines, and this is compounding the problem of underwhelming Western support.

However, Ukraine has yet to pull the trigger on recruitment ahead of the expected Russian push, as authorities are worried about the political fallout mobilization measures might bring amid draft-dodging and avoidance of conscription papers. Zaluzhny had already publicly called for the mobilization of more troops back in December, estimating Ukraine needed at least an additional 500,000 men. The draft issue has gone back and forth ever since.

Then, last week, General Oleksandr Syrsky — Zaluzhny’s replacement — abruptly announced that Ukraine might not need quite so many fresh troops. After a review of resources, the figure has been “significantly reduced,” and “we expect that we will have enough people capable of defending their motherland,” he told the Ukrinform news agency. “I am talking not only about the mobilized but also about volunteer fighters,” he said.

The plan is to move as many desk-bound uniformed personnel and those in noncombat roles to the front lines as possible, after an intensive three- to four-month training. But the senior officers POLITICO spoke to said that Syrsky was wrong and “playing along with narratives from politicians.” Then, on Tuesday, Zelenskyy signed some additional parts to an old mobilization law tightening the legal requirements for draft-age Ukrainian men to register their details, and lowering the minimum age for call-up from 27 to 25. But in Ukraine, this is just seen as tinkering.

 “We don’t only have a military crisis — we have a political one,” one of the officers said. While Ukraine shies away from a big draft, “Russia is now gathering resources and will be ready to launch a big attack around August, and maybe sooner.”

So, Musk may not be too wide of the mark after all.